We authors know they are out there. We get e-mails from them and posts on our Facebook pages. Our social media data tells us about them, too, with little graphs. Our international sales are sometimes weighted in their direction.

I am talking about Millennial readers of historical romance.

There is a common wisdom about historical romances. It goes like this. “Historical romance is a mature subgenre.” By that, editors mean it has been around a long time and is unlikely to see the huge growth that a new, breakout subgenre may display. It also means that it is tried and true and a perennial on bestseller lists and in stores. It continues to be among the subgenres that get the most sales, year in and year out, but it is rarely the one that gets the top sales in any given year.

However, sometimes that “mature” label also gets applied to its readers. They are older, the assumption goes. Older than Millennials, for certain. And overall this may be true. As the age brackets get older, historical romance gets an increasing share of the market.

But Millennials are reading historical romances, too. I decided to go a little beyond the anecdotal evidence of that and do a little survey. It wasn’t scientific, but the results give a snapshot of this section of our readership.

The survey ran about a year ago (life interfered with making an earlier report). I posted a link to the survey on my Facebook page and shared it with other writers to use to spread the word. Without trying very hard, I received about 100 responses that I can use (some responded who were not Millennials, for example).

What did I learn?

Just over 51% of the readers who responded were under age 30. The rest were 30-35. Just under 5% were under age 25.

On average, they read six historical romances a month, with as few as one and as many as 20. Some just responded “a bunch” or “a LOT.” On average, they had been reading historical romances for 14 years, with as few as three and as many as 20. The implications I take away from this are:

They started reading them early, sometimes when in their early teens.

They are following the tradition with romance readers of reading a lot of romance books.

I asked for their favorite tropes. For this, they could either check boxes of tropes I provided or add their own. The overwhelming favorite, with almost 100% choosing it: marriage of convenience. Other strong contenders were friends-to-lovers at 67%, arranged marriage at 50% and second chance at love at 39%.

I also asked for favorite authors, but soon realized that of all the questions, this was the least scientific because the pool of readers was skewed toward … me. And toward readers who read other authors who often are read by readers who read me. So aside from the consistent presence of the really BIG authors, like Julia Quinn and Mary Balogh, to report the findings on this part of the survey would be lopsided. However, there were some authors named who were not, from my view, predictable. That is of interest to me, but not of much use for any kind of objectivity, so I am excluding all those results.

I will say this about those favorite-author responses: In my view, they were not very different from what a survey of older readers would list. In fact, as I mentioned, I had some older readers do the survey, and there weren’t noticeable differences in general on this. The Millennials’ lists did not skew toward younger authors or names I did not recognize, which nowadays could happen. In fact, some of them included classic authors who have not published historical romances for quite a few years, such as Iris Johansen and Catherine Coulter.

I will conclude with some anecdotal observations that I have made over the last few years, labeling them frankly as that. First, I mentioned the international readers. My international readers skew much younger than my U.S. readers do. In Portugal, Brazil, France, Germany — I meet and hear from readers who are Millennials or younger far more often than readers who are over 40. I did a signing in Lisbon about eight years ago, and all of the readers who came were Millennials.

Second, in the U.S., my readers who come from diverse backgrounds are often Millennials or younger. I meet them at signings and again hear from them on Facebook. I don’t draw any conclusions from that. I just find it interesting.

USA TODAY and New York Times bestseller Madeline Hunter is the two-time RITA-winning author of 30 historical romances. Her latest release is A Devil of a Duke, and her next release, Never Deny a Duke, will be published on April 30. You can find her at www.MadelineHunter.com.